By the year 2010 there will be approximately 5,500 pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) beds, about 22,000 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) beds, and about 110,000 non-intensive care (non-ICU) pediatric care beds in the United States of America. Rendering care to these hospitalized children represents a large, significant, and growing cost to health care expense. The importance of intensive care and non-intensive care monitoring in patient safety is recognized as a priority by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations. Intensive care and non-intensive care monitors are used to continuously evaluate the clinical status of patients and track their response to a wide range of interventions. Despite tremendous advancements in computer technology and bioinformatics, intensive care and non-intensive care monitoring devices have not provided significantly new information to bedside caregivers. Simplified cardiopulmonary monitoring is now routinely performed in hospitalized non-intensive care patients.
Rapid Response (RR) teams have been established to rescue non-ICU pediatric patients who are decompensating and in need of critical care evaluation. These teams are triggered by any health care provider (nurse, respiratory therapist, physician, etc.) or family members resulting in a stat evaluation by an expert team of health care providers that can initiate lifesaving support and transfer patients to an ICU. These teams have been shown to be effective at saving the lives of both pediatric and adult hospitalized inpatients.
Software tools are available for evaluating a patient's risk of mortality for patients in PICU, NICU and non-ICU pediatric facilities. However, conventional tools only evaluate a patient's risk of mortality based on raw variables considered individually. Models that evaluate a patient's risk of mortality based on raw variables considered individually lack accuracy and lead to false alarms. For example, conventional monitors that monitor intensive care patients' vital signs alarm frequently due to variability in the raw data, even when patients are not at risk of imminent death. As a result, hospital staff and physicians often ignore such alarms.
Accordingly, there exists a long felt need for methods, systems, and computer readable media for evaluating a hospital patient's risk of mortality.